Sunday, July 26, 2015

TISA and the Grebacle (from the notebook)

TISA = Trade in Services Agreement, Grebacle = Greek debacle, a subject I've been too discouraged to write about so far. (I would happily have given a headline link to the US government's page on TISA, but there is almost nothing there, so in protest I'm linking Wikileaks instead.)

On July 6th, I had been writing about Greece for a week or so, and one evening I was reminded by David Dayen that the capital controls the Bank of Greece used to survive would be outlawed under the proposed TISA agreement. If Dayen is correct, most effective consumer banking regulation would be outlawed under TISA, leading to a situation where hoarding cash might again become reasonable. Are we all to be made into Greece? Or what?